The Gun Is Civilization

[iverglas]

29. there's one tiny distinction

that kinda shoots the analogy down, I fear. And of course it isn't really so tiny; it's really quite fundamental.

You don't believe people should have the right to defend themselves as they see fit, and you don't believe nations should, either.

I would first say that you are barking up the wrong analogy, of course. It isn't about what either people or peoples should be permitted to do, it is about what they should be permitted to have.

You could just as easily use the firearm that you have because you "have the right to defend yourself as you see fit" to kill your spouse. Just as Iran could use the nuclear weapon that it has because it "has the right to defend itself as it sees fit" to wipe out a nation that is no threat to it.

Anyway, that fundamental flaw aside: the rules governing what weapons individuals within a nation-state may possess are not imposed by the local thugs.

You are saying (and I am not disagreeing) that the US is the equivalent of the local thug, on the international scene.

So while you can argue on that basis that the US is not in a position of moral or any other authority to tell any other nation-state what weapons it may and may not have, you may not claim that it doing so is analogous to firearms control within a nation-state.

If there were a body that operated internationally the way a government of a democratic nation-state operates -- a body with legitimate authority based on some counterpart to democracy, at the supra-state level -- that decided to impose rules governing weapons nation-states were permitted to possess, that would be the analogy to domestic firearms control. And obviously such a body would require not just the authority to make and implement decisions, but the power to implement them, in order to be analogous.

No such body exists at present, of course. But governments do exist in democratic nation-states, and their firearms control policies are simply not analogous to the US's desire to control what weapons other nation-states have.